


losing & losing & having lost

by piketrickfoot



Series: a tiny town by the sea. [2]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Bittersweet, Character Study, Gen, my girl is angsty: the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2019-03-27 18:54:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13887042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piketrickfoot/pseuds/piketrickfoot
Summary: “I’m going to jump,” Asta said, as much a warning to them as it was a promise to herself. She looked down at the water, roiling, smacking again and again against the edges of the pier. She edged closer to it.“You’re going towhat -”Asta stepped off the pier before Aetri could finish.





	losing & losing & having lost

**Author's Note:**

> more self-indulgent Asta rambling. what can i say i love her

Somewhere deep in the mountains of Tyena, just south of the city of Mherta, there is an old, nearly broken-down inn that is covered in snow year-round. It is small and shabby, run by an aging drow woman by the name of Tali, and it boasts only four rooms to its name. The rooms are one-bed affairs, with a communal bath at the end of the hall, and nearly all the old, woolen blankets are moth-bitten around the edges. It is here, squirreled away from the bitter cold outside, picking absently at one of the holes in the soft green blanket on the bed, that Asta Lenore finally, _finally_ allows her thoughts to wander to her wayward brother. 

See, it had been two years since that last, tumultuous fight - she could still remember the exact moment when she knew it was all about to go to shit, the slight widening of Aetri’s eyes, the quick-as-lightning flashes of _shock-horror-anguish-betrayal-rage_ that had twisted her brother’s face into something terrifying. Asta had been seventeen, definitely not a child, but in that moment she’d felt twelve again, watching the tears well up in Kas’ eyes as he explained to them what had happened to their mother and father. 

Really, that was where it had all gone wrong. Asta had been too young to see it, but looking back, something in her brothers had shifted that day. She had ignored it, avoided looking them in the eyes for fear of seeing the difference, but it had been there nonetheless. 

Kas didn’t smile anymore. The playful laughter with which he’d accepted his position as older brother, as de facto caretaker when Yana and Wilhelm were out of the house was gone, replaced with grim acceptance. 

Asta could still remember the last outing the three of them had taken before the news had forced Kas to grow up. It was raining, a cold and heavy thing that had Asta complaining loudly in their entry hall as she peeled off her socks. Kas and Aetri were already huddled around the fire, swaddled in grey woolen blankets and clutching steaming mugs of the soup that Wilhelm had left on the stove for them before he left that morning. Asta had wriggled her way between them, forcing them both to wrap their blankets around her. Wordlessly, Kas passed her a mug. They sat in silence, watching the flames lick up the sides of their fireplace. 

An hour later, Aetri grew bored of waiting. “We should go somewhere,” he said, rising and dumping his blanket over Asta’s head like a ghost. Asta shrieked indignantly, and Kas scoffed. 

“Where are we going to go, ‘Tri? It’s pouring rain.” 

“We should visit the docks!” Asta piped up, knocking the blanket off her head with her free hand. “Maybe we can see if Mum and Da are back yet. Maybe we’ll finally find that sea monster!” 

Kas and Aetri shook their heads fondly as one. 

“Asta, that was just a story Old Screweye made up to mess with you when you were, like, six. It didn’t mean anything. There are no sea monsters,” Kas said. Asta puffed up like a pufferfish. 

“Yeah, well, _I’ll_ be the judge of that!” 

Asta stuck her tongue out at her brothers and then, ducking under Kas’ arm with the kind of nimbleness no one but a child can match, she ran for the door. Kas and Aetri watched in horror as she scrambled through it, out into the darkness and the torrential downpour, the door still cracked open just a tad. She hadn’t even put her shoes on. 

They followed. 

Kas stopped to pull on his coat and boots, but Aetri didn’t slow for a second, his bare feet splashing through the puddles on the cobblestone street towards the docks. Asta had vanished, though whether due to the rain, or the darkness, or the winding nature of Wister Bay, Aetri couldn’t be sure. 

The trees hung low like the tendrils of an unspeakable evil, thorny branches catching like fingers on Asta’s cloak, and she felt a sudden stab of fear which only made her run faster. She didn’t stop until she reached the end of the pier, peering all around out into the waves, though through the torrent she couldn’t see much. Her long braid was soaked through, as were all her clothes, and her feet were beginning to prune in the puddles. 

There were no boats on the waves. This was odd only because usually at this time of night, all the boats were already docked, or at least on their way to doing so. But Asta could see nothing. 

Disappointed, she sat down at the end of the pier, her toes grazing the edge of the water. It was then that Aetri caught up to her, Kas close behind. There was a feeling in her gut that she could not - _would not_ \- put a name to, and she leaned her head against Aetri’s shoulder when he sat down next to her. 

Much later, lying in an old, dusty inn with her travelling companions, Asta would finally call that feeling what it was. 

_Dread._

Around twenty minutes later, in an attempt to rid herself of the feeling, Asta had stood back up in a manner so decisive it startled Aetri. Kas, who was still standing, only looked down at her expectantly. 

“I’m going to jump,” Asta said, as much a warning to them as it was a promise to herself. She looked down at the water, roiling, smacking again and again against the edges of the pier. She edged closer to it. 

“You’re going to _what -_ ” 

Asta stepped off the pier before Aetri could finish. She plunged, feet first, into the dark and angry sea, amid the shouts of her brothers and the thunder in the distance, the kelp at the bottom winding around her legs and threatening to drag her under. Asta closed her eyes and let out the air in her lungs, letting herself sink to the bottom. Her braid had come undone, and her hair was all around her. 

She heard a splash somewhere to her left, then another. Arms wrapped around her midsection and pulled her upwards as she thrashed, gasping in a breath as they breached. She looked up through her bangs to see Kas, gasping, trying to drag them both back to the relative safety of the pier. 

Asta’s memory blanks out there. She doesn’t remember being dragged out of the water, or tucked under her brothers’ arms, or bustled off back to their house. Her memory of those days doesn’t come back until the next afternoon, when the rain finally stops and Kas is sitting her and Aetri down on their front stoop, voice never wavering as he explains that _we’re on our own now_ , that _don’t you worry, I’ll take care of us like always,_ that _Asta, mum and da are never coming home_. 

They’re never coming home. 

Asta is twelve. She doesn’t understand a lot of things - the way the sun leaves the sky when it’s time to sleep, or how there came to be so much water on their world, or what half the books in their parents’ bedroom say - but she does understand this: when her parents leave, they come back. When her parents go away on their boat, they always come back. This is the way it has always been. 

They’re never coming home. 

Asta runs. Kas and Aetri are too slow to catch her as she bolts down the street, feet hitting the cobblestone hard enough to hurt. She darts past her neighbors to the docks, where there’s a boat that isn’t her parents’ in the spot where they usually drop anchor. She’s breathing hard. 

She asks around. Nobody’s seen them. Some of Yana’s old friends look at her with sad eyes but she ignores them. When her parents leave, they always come back. This is something Asta knows. So she keeps running, hoping with all the strength in her lanky, twelve-year-old body that she’ll spot the hem of her mother’s cloak, her father’s horns glinting in the sunlight, and they’ll scold Kas and Aetri for telling her a lie like this and everything will be fine. 

She doesn’t stop running until she reaches the lighthouse. Its door is pushed just slightly open and she sneaks in, feet pattering up the steps until she reaches its highest point, looking out at the ocean from the floor-to-ceiling windows at the top of the tower.

There are no boats on the sea. 

Asta sinks to the floor. She stays there for three days. When Aetri finally finds her, she is sobbing quietly into her sleeve. 

“ _Sidera_ ,” he says, voice full of equal parts adoration and anguish, and Asta understands. 

Back in that old, decrepit inn, Asta shakes herself out of her reverie and looks over at her travelling companions. Visalian has disappeared, stolen off into the night to brood or knit or suck someone’s blood or whatever it is he does whenever she and Kathra aren’t looking. (Asta has a theory that her friend is a vampire. It’s very well supported, and there are several pages in her travel journal dedicated to the evidence. It doesn’t bother her, it is just a fact. Kathra is pretty and sings like a nightingale, Asta can’t swim and likes sunflowers, and Visalian is probably a vampire. These are just empirical truths about the world.)

Kathra is still asleep a few feet away. Her hair has fallen into her face, and Asta pushes it out of the way and tries not to feel like she’s just committed a crime. 

She still remembers how it felt when Aetri left. Like a punch to the gut, like the rawest, most anguished betrayal anyone’s ever committed. She knows it isn’t about her, not really, knows that if Aetri had stayed he and Kas would have torn each other down so many times that finally neither of them were anything but rubble, and she hates that it’s come to this. They were the best of friends, back before the sea had taken their parents - she could still remember snapshots of it, brief moments of respite from the constancy of their battles. 

When she was sixteen, Kas had noticed that their old raspberry bush - grown frail and thorny and fruitless from the lack of care - had, somehow, borne fruit once again. He’d whooped like a child and hustled them out into the garden, and the three of them had eaten raspberries until they were sick and still collected enough to bake them into a pie the next day, Kas directing his siblings from their mother’s old hand-scrawled cookbook. 

She could pinpoint the last bright spot in their relationship exactly. On her seventeenth birthday, Kas and Aetri had worked to put together a picnic, and the three of them had gone down to the Cove, spreading out an old tartan blanket and laughing until their sides hurt at the crabs that gathered to pinch at Aetri’s tail. 

Asta spent the better part of two hours hunting down a trio of matching seashells, perfect peach-colored whorls that gleamed in the late-afternoon sunshine. She hid them in one of the inner pockets of her cloak and curled up next to Aetri, her head on his shoulder. 

For the next three weeks, she worked to turn the shells into three identical necklaces - drilled holes in them for the clasp, found lengths of chain with which to string them, engraved the letters _K. A. A._ into the underside of the shells like a prayer. 

When they were finally finished, Asta finally pleased with the end result, she’d scooped them up from her workbench and taken them out to Kas and Aetri. 

Kas and Aetri, who weren’t in the kitchen like they usually were. As Asta frowned, she heard something crash in her parents’ old bedroom, and then a wild bout of screaming. She rushed into the room just in time to hear - 

“ _Fuck you,_ Kas.” And Aetri was gone. 

Like with her parents’ deaths, it took her a while to accept that Aetri was never coming back. She held onto the shells for a year, just in case it was all a big joke, or maybe Aetri was just making a dramatic exit, but he never returned. No one in town had seen hide nor hair of him since the day before. 

She had even ventured, once or twice, into the seedy part of town Aetri used to hang out in. His best friend, she knew, was a gruff-looking woman of twenty-two, with a shaved head and tattoos all over her exposed arms and down her back. Asta approached her one day, eyes pleading, hands clasped in worry. 

“Tarsi, have you seen my brother?” she asked, as loudly as she dared. Tarsi raised an eyebrow at her. 

“Kid, that boy’s been gone in all senses but physical. He’d planned to leave here for nearly half a year before he finally up and did it. Not surprised he didn’t tell you.” 

And oh, didn’t that just fucking sting? Asta still felt a pang of… something, something like anguish, or guilt, or self-loathing, because Aetri had had his problems with Kas, but Asta didn’t even know she’d done anything to incur her brother’s hatred as well. 

Because surely if he didn’t hate her just as bitterly he would have said _something_. He’d had half a year to broach the subject, to tell her he was thinking about going away, even just to let her know it wasn’t her fault? Surely he would have written, or given Tarsi a message for her, or _anything_? She wants to find him just so that she can understand, so that she can force him to give her _something_ before she turns away forever. 

It’s not about reconciliation. After everything that’s happened between the three of them, Asta doesn’t dare to hope for that. She still loves her brother, of course she does, some things can’t even be beaten out of you with an anchor or a shovel, but she has learned to live without him. She has learned to deal with being the unwanted little sister, the undeserving benefactor of all her siblings’ pain, the deep-rooted sadness that comes with being abandoned by someone you love. 

And Kas was no better. As the days dragged on past Aetri’s departure, Asta tried desperately to bring them back together. She stole mulberries from their neighbor’s yard and tried to nonchalantly ask Kas to bake them into a pie with her, like that day so many lifetimes ago, but Kas was distant now. He waved her away with a flick of his hand, retreating into his workshop. 

Asta climbed up onto the roof and fed the mulberries to the crows that frequented the area, trying not to feel sorry for herself. 

Kas was gone more and more frequently, showing his inventions at faires and markets in faraway towns, smiles painted onto his face for the public and gone entirely when he was once again faced with the reality of the big, empty house meant for five, populated now barely by a pair of virtual strangers. 

Asta didn’t know this Kas. She didn’t know his hands, worn delicate and calloused by the hours of hard work, once so sturdy and yet now gone gaunt with worry and undereating like the rest of him. His face was pale and sallow, his back almost always hunched over, and he was irritable with her in a way he had never been before everything. 

Asta almost missed the fighting. She was pretty sure it would be better than this. She spent long hours by herself, locked alone in the room she once shared with both her brothers, now solely her own as Kas had moved fully into their parents’ old room. She taught herself about the Fateweaver, she translated ancient Deep Speech documents first into Common, then, for fun, into Infernal, went days and sometimes weeks without interacting with another person because it was a miracle if her brother had time for her and Lord knows she had no one else. 

She had meant to crush the shells beneath her feet, but in the end she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It felt too… final, like the breaking of the last string on the marionette, the last remnants of the sand castle washing away, pouring out the last dregs of a cup of coffee into the sink, so she kept them. They’re nestled in her bag now, wrapped gently in tissue paper, like she’s ever going to find a use for them. She knows she’s not. 

And fuck, Asta’s crying thinking about it now. She wipes away a tear with the palm of her hand and stifles a sob. 

She misses the days when everything was easy. Back then, her brothers and she were best friends. All the other neighborhood kids had been envious of and confused by the dynamic in equal measure, convinced that there could be no siblinghood without rivalry, but there had never been anything like that between the three of them. Asta loved her brothers unconditionally, looked up to them, protected them with all the fierceness her child’s bones could muster - and they had, as far as she knew, felt much the same towards her and towards each other. 

The winds and the waves had taken more than their parents that night. Among the shipwrecks and the kelp lay Asta’s easiest days, her brothers’ earnest smiles and genuine laughter, their days of mischief-making and lazing around their house. 

Kas had been forced to grow up too fast. Aetri had been misplaced, caught in the headlights of a town which no longer had a place for him, a brother who refused to respect his mourning because he’d never been allowed to mourn himself, a sister who was too young to understand any of this and felt only betrayal when he left. 

And Asta had learned there are more ways than death to lose a family.


End file.
